Finnish Lutherans Organize Apart From the Suomi Synod

The National Evangelical Lutheran Church began in 1898 at Rock Springs, Wyoming, where eight laymen and a Finnish Lutheran pastor organized a congregation under the name Finnish Evangelical Lutheran National Church of America. Its founders had either left the Suomi Synod or had never joined it, standing apart over disputes about doctrine and over how much freedom and autonomy a local congregation should hold against synodical authority. Theologically the new body stressed the forgiveness of sins and the certainty of salvation, taught baptismal regeneration, and held that a sinner could receive forgiveness once he had experienced a genuine feeling of his own sin, without the more extended process of preparation some other Finnish Lutheran teaching required. The church grew mainly among Finnish immigrant communities far from Rock Springs, above all in the copper and iron mining country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and along the Iron Range of northeastern Minnesota, the same region that produced the Suomi Synod and the Apostolic Lutheran Church of America. It reported 10,300 members in 1902, its first decades of growth. In 1946 it took the name it would carry until its own institutional life ended less than two decades later, the National Evangelical Lutheran Church.